Consumers, particularly large-scale business consumers, such as consumers (e.g., United Parcel Service of America, Inc.), and/or the like must periodically procure (e.g., lease and/or purchase) commodities/items/goods/services, such as equipment and services. For example, parcel delivery services may be required to lease additional transportation vehicles during peak shipping periods in order to move parcels from an origin to a destination in a timely manner. As yet another example, businesses may be required to purchase goods (e.g., auto repair parts) and/or services (e.g., automotive maintenance services) from one or more vendors.
Historically, consumer representatives (e.g., business employees/personnel) have been required to send numerous communications to local commodities/items vendors in order to ascertain whether local and/or national vendors are able to fulfill the consumer's commodity/item needs in a timely and cost effective manner. Upon receiving information/data from potentially numerous vendors, consumer representatives must make comparisons between the offerings of each of the plurality of vendors, even though the information/data provided by the vendors may be incomplete, in incompatible formats, or otherwise difficult to compare.
Thus, a need exists for systems and methods for facilitating the process of procuring commodities/items, including systems and methods for facilitating communication between consumers (e.g., business consumers) and vendors.